Book Review: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Title: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: This was considered one of the best nonfiction books of 2011
Source: I bought it for Eddie for his birthday and he finally finished it
Books I've read this year: 1

This book has been sitting on my bedside table or Eddie's bedside table, for the last nine months. I gave it to him for his birthday and expected both of us to read it. Reviewers were showering it with praise and I figured that since I'm a reading omnivore and he's a doctor, it's exactly the kind of book we would both really love.

But it sat and sat and sat on our bedside tables, and neither of us picked it up. It doesn't have a sexy cover, it's true, and the subject matter is inherently kind of depressing, but it wasn't the C-word that kept me from reading, it was the fact that the book is 608 pages and the book feels more like a doorstop than like something you want to curl up in bed with. Also, I knew that the book would take me a couple of weeks to read, and one of the downsides of keeping track of how many books I read is that I sometimes shy away from reading awesome books that might require more time and investment because I want to keep my numbers high. Shallow, much?

Then Eddie decided to read the book over the holidays and when he finished, several weeks later he told me that he didn't think I could get through it. I do like a challenge so I decided to start off 2012 by finally tackling The Emperor of All Maladies.

The book chronicles some of the historical highlights in the fight against cancer, as well as some of the more interesting personalities who played pivotal roles. Mukherjee, who began writing the book while he was an oncology fellow at one of the Harvard hospitals, is a fantastic writer who intersperses his own experiences with a roughly chronological account of the history of the disease. The stories he chooses to highlight really are interesting, and the medical terminology is accessible to a layperson. My enjoyment rating reflects the fact that since the story was more about disease, treatment and lab experiments, it's inherently less interesting than a story about people. But Mukherjee did an admirable job making the story less about history than about the significant players, challenges, and successes.